Born LeaderPresidential biography seeks to uncover true story of American hero

By Michael Sims

MAY 1, 2000:
Welsh writer Jan Morris is best known as the author of literate,
engaging reports of her travels to the far corners of the world. Many of
these essays were published originally in the New Yorker and
gathered into collections with such titles as Cities and
Places and Journeys. They skip from Venice to Manhattan to
Hong Kong and many points between. Morris writes with a kind of casual
grace. As with many peripatetic writers before her--Jonathan Raban and
Peter Matthiessen come to mind--we read her as much for her companionship
as for her insights into cultures different from our own.

One of Morris' strengths is her ability to convey how the
cherished assumptions of any place reflect the history that shaped it. She
has brought this signature talent to a surprising subject in her new book,
Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest. She explains in a foreword that when
she first came to the United States in the 1950s, Lincoln idolatry was at
its peak. "He cropped up in all the conversations by which kind Americans
tried to introduce me to the meaning of their country," she writes, "and he
seemed to stare down at me monumentally from every other public place, with
a mixture of the judgmental, the homespun, and the sanctimonious that I
came to find intolerable."

Not that Morris is a harsh critic of American life; she is skeptical of
God's-country silliness but fond of Americans in general. She is merely too
sensible to succumb to hoary mythologies. The myths are familiar to
everyone, Americans and questing foreigners alike. What Morris wanted to
learn for herself was how much of the man remains when the myths are
stripped away. She decided to find out, and the result is this impressive
little book. Rather to her surprise, it seems, she grew to like her
subject.

Morris visits all of the sacred sights associated with the Lincoln
story, from his nativity in Illinois to his Golgotha at Ford's Theater. She
follows in his tracks from a wild youth on river boats to an early manhood
spent lawyering in Springfield to a political and spiritual coming-of-age
in the White House. By going in and out of the present and past, Morris
conveys simultaneously the look and feel of the Lincoln-idolatry industry
and the world of the man himself. Gradually, we absorb the textures and
assumptions of the barbaric young nation, still giddy with adolescent
energy and confusion, that produced Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln's modest beginnings are part of his deification, as if he had
been born in a manger with attendant wise men. Actually, as Morris writes,
"if Lincoln were to be born today, he would be born in a mobile home." His
family was what is nowadays described as white trash. Lincoln described his
boyhood as "stinted," and his friend and first biographer called young
Abraham's pioneer culture "a stagnant, putrid pool."

How Lincoln rises above his dreadful origin has always been part of the
lure of the story. One answer is surprisingly simple: books. Like many
heroes before and since, he really did read his way out of oblivion and
into history. Our knowledge of his later climb to the status of "great man"
lends his early days a misty halo of significance, and his tragic end
enables us to cast it all in operatic tones. Understandably, skeptics
protest. But the fact remains that, when the time came, Abraham Lincoln
grew into the role for which history had cast him: a hugely unpopular
American president whose nation was at war during his entire term in
office.

Innocent readers may be shocked to learn that the ambitious young
Lincoln could be a sneaky lawyer and a shamelessly manipulative legislator.
And what is often portrayed as his Falstaffian wit seems really to have
been more of a Jerry Clower-ish goofiness. Apparently, not even his
underlings laughed at most of his homespun jokes, and Lincoln is on record
as frequently rebuffing his unamused colleagues. Disappointed with
Lincoln's irreverence, a sanctimonious cabinet member advised the president
to use a guaranteed crowd-pleasing ploy that is still popular in political
speeches: lots of references to God.

In only a couple hundred pages, Morris sketches Lincoln's love for his
rowdy children and devotion to his unstable wife, his fondness for
Shakespeare, and his lifelong struggle with depression. And she paints a
quick portrait of his spiritual evolution. At the helm of a violently
divided country--whose rupture he had helped to engineer--he was almost
single-handedly responsible for most of the major decisions in the war. And
out of this cauldron came the Abraham Lincoln we remember and idealize, the
man whose moral burden is conveyed in the photographs documenting the
erosion of his craggy Rushmore face.